As we all return to work after the Bank Holiday weekend, the big issues I’ve picked for today’s Daily View are about governance: specifically, how the British state should relate to its citizens or how the world should govern the nuclear ambitions of a rogue state.

2 Big Stories

David Cameron is making a bid for reformist credentials with a wide-ranging speech on democratic accountability and the nature of politics and the state. Previewed in The Guardian, his remarks later today thoughtfully ponder ‘the post-bureaucratic age’ and try to appropriate liberal principles:

The Tory leader, who has in the past week ended the parliamentary careers of a series of senior Conservative MPs who made “wrong” expenses claims, writes: “I believe the central objective of the new politics we need should be a massive, sweeping, radical redistribution of power. From the state to citizens; from the government to parliament; from Whitehall to communities. From the EU to Britain; from judges to the people; from bureaucracy to democracy. Through decentralisation, transparency and accountability we must take power away from the political elite and hand it to the man and woman in the street.”

Fine aspirations. (Excepting the knee-jerk rejection of cooperation on supra-national issues; has noone told you, Dave, we’re “stronger together, poorer apart”?). But can Cameron really bring his party of authoritarians on this expedition into liberalism when they get into power? Given what we know about the men and women who’ll make up his parliamentary majority, I think not.

Meanwhile, in world news, the UN Security Council has unanimously condemned North Korea’s second and latest nuclear test:

The provocative test sparked global condemnation, even from China, the reclusive communist state’s only ally. Yet it was clear that the West was powerless to halt the nuclear programme.

President Obama said that the test was a great threat to the peace and security of the world and a blatant violation of international law. Gordon Brown called it erroneous, misguided and a danger to the world. Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General and a South Korean, said that he was deeply disturbed by the detonation, which was detected by US scientists as a magnitude 4.7 earthquake.

The New Zealand experience showed it takes a lot of time and effort to engage with a bemused public, who are more concerned with other things, and explain the merits of the alternative voting systems. The New Zealand reformers’ final victory in 1993 was the result of many years’ campaigning by a broad cross-section of political and community groups. The anti-change forces hit back, and started to close the gap in the final months before the vote. There’s no reason to suppose that this country would be any different.

Meanwhile, the Himmelgarten Cafe served us a large platter of database peril. As Costigan Quist notes, the government has been losing sensitive personal information faster than an MP’s moat gets silted up:

Remember that the Government has spent the last few years trying to set up a “Spine”: a big national database to contain all our health records, accessible by medical staff across the country. The flimsy justification for this has always been that you or I can go into any hospital in the country and staff will easily get hold of our notes… The problem is, that sort of thing doesn’t happen very often. In reality, nearly all visits are to local hospitals and our normal GP. The small number of cases where it does happen seems out of all proportion to the huge cost and complexity of maintaining a national database of medical records.

From rogue MPs to rogue states and roguish voting systems to rogue data. It’s funny what’s in vogue.

13 Comments

I see ‘Call me Dave’ has already got his oar in the water against PR, saying that it transfers power to ‘the elites’. Ha, ha, ha! As opposed to leaving it where it should be, in the hands of the Etonians.

Nick Clegg should be saying what a pile of manure Dave’s so-called reform proposals are and should be condemning them for what they are: a half-hearted tinkering with the way the existing parliament works. They are being dressed up as ‘radical reform’. Go on Nick, sock it to him with a pro-PR punch!

PR does leave hands in the power of the elites, as demonstrated quite beautifully by the mechanism for electing MEPs whereby only the party’s favourite candidates will ever make it to the top of the list.

Anyway, leaving that aside for one moment, the Conservative Party may well have some authoritarian elements but if you knew anything about Cameron, you would appreciate that he is a liberal conservative and it is him and his cabinet who will choose the direction of the party – not the old guard.

LFAT: on MEP selection, this may be how it works within the Conservative Party, but in the Liberal Democrats, those at the top of regional Eurolists are selected by party members, not the party leadership. And this is not just merely the formal position: anyone who has had any involvement will tell you that those selected into the top one or two positions on regional Eurolists in the Lib Dems are those who have over a period of years put themselves into a position of being respected by a broad range of party members. And of course the final decision is done by a vote of all party members in the region.

The fact that this is how it happens in this liberal party, and in the Conservative position it is done by thinly-disguised decision of the leader, shows us quite helpfully the difference between a liberal party and a conservative one – or perhaps, more helpfully, in this context, the difference between a party led by a liberal, and a party led by a conservative. There is no such thing as a “liberal conservative”. All I need to know about Cameron is that he is a Conservative. Yes, he may be on the more gay-friendly, ethnic minority-friendly wing of his party, but he is a Conservative. And Conservatives do not give away power. The clue is in the name, but the evidence is in the experience. And the evidence comes not only from past Conservative governments or current Conservative councils, but also from Cameron himself: his so-called devolution of powers to local councils is nothing of the kind: it contains for example no real devolution of control of finances, without which there is no real devolution (there are other examples too: see http://www.jeremyhargreaves.org/blog/2009/deciding-council-tax-nationally-is-not-returning-power-to-local-communities-dave/ for more on this.)

Cameron is a Conservative, and if he ever becomes Prime Minister, he will be a Conservative Prime Minister. Rushing out some imprecise rhetoric about the need for change does not make him a real believer in constitutional reform.

I disagree with the way that the Conservative Party does things, but if the Lib Dems ever become relevant in British politics in terms of running the country then there is no way that they would let the party members choose who runs the country.

The Lib Dems can beat their drum as much as they want, but don’t think for a second that they can take the moral high ground – it’s only because they’ll never get near any real power that they would even contemplate letting their members have a real say.

And, boy, do you need to do some reading about conservative philosophy if you think liberal conservatism doesn’t exist. Geeesh.

Sara – yes, you are of course quite right that there is a huge incumbency advantage for MEPs who are already there, and this is a problem. But I think the point that members choose the MEPs still applies: for example in the first place, before they ever become an MEP; for anyone aiming for a second place where we have one MEP, and indeed also where we have two (whatever came afterwards, the North East had a real contest for members’ votes between two incumbent MEPs, as also happened when this applied in the South West a few years ago).

LFAT: thank you for your charming reply, which did a lot to challenge the image of Tories as sneering.

And if you must use “yawn”, surely the point that the Lib Dems are an irrelevant party has been made here before? (by people who are bothering to engage with a party that they argue no-one should bother to engage with). In any case, relishing how unimportant the Lib Dems are does not change the fact that you are wrong, about this party, to say: “PR does leave hands in the power of the elites, as demonstrated quite beautifully by the mechanism for electing MEPs whereby only the party’s favourite candidates will ever make it to the top of the list.” That simply is not the mechanism (formal or real) of this party.

I also don’t really take your point about parties in power not allowing members a say: aren’t the leaders (and therefore prospective PMs – real PMs in they’re already in power) of both the two largest parties now chosen by all party members?

Finally, there may well be a lot of literature about ‘liberal conservatism’. There is a lot of literature about Intelligent Design but that doesn’t mean I’m not entitled not to accept it exists.

“PR does leave hands in the power of the elite” says Letter from a Tory, completely failing to mention the fact that FPTP leaves it in the hands of a group of people the majority of whom voted against. How does that amount to a clear-cut exercise of democratic choice?

Cameron’s swipe at PR is dependent on contrasting it with a laughable, cartoon version of how our system operates at the moment and he deserves to be ridiculed for his arguments.

And Letters from a Tory: please stop using an argument from personal incredulity (a logical fallacy). Just because you can’t understand a party faithfully adhering to their manifesto because the Tories wouldn’t, doesn’t mean the Lib Dems wouldn’t adhere to their manifesto.

But even the LD method of selection for the Euro parliament is anti-democratic: there’s no way for the average voter to boot the incumbents out, because they are probably at the top of the party list. We need a form of government that allows voters to choose individuals, rather than parties, precisely in order to be able to fire the last lot.

Sanbikinoraion – I think you are talking about the vote that is cast in polling day, not the internal party selection? If so, the LDs argued hard for “open lists” which allow exactly this, rather than the closed ones we have, when this legislation was going through Parliament in 1998. For a while it looked like the Lords might make it an interesting weapon in the battles then going on about the future composition of the Lords. But in the end the other parties didn’t support us, and it didn’t get through. This is a shame but not our fault! Unfortunately the laws on candidacy does not allow us to do this unilaterally.

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